GMW:
I appreciate your openness and sense of balance.
It sounds as though we can agree that imposed limitations (such as show-don't tell) are best treated not as inflexible rules, but as ways of understanding and approaching the process of writing/reading fiction.
§ § § § §
I think of the rules of tonal and modal counterpoint that way. In traditional classical music, one avoids parallel fifths not because they're taboo but because they're thought to cause two individual parts to become a single part, which destroys the independence of the separate lines.
In other words, in polyphonic music, one is playing a game of multilevel chess. The point is to learn to make each level interesting in itself yet work simultaneously with the other levels; to understand how to create a texture of
cooperative independence in a piece of polyphonic music, not simply to acquire an aesthetic phobia.
From the late 19th century on, one does find parallel fifths routinely in polyphonic music. That's because composers had begun working with a far wider harmonic palette, and had reached the conclusion that parallel fifths could be treated exactly like parallel thirds and sixths. See the piano sonatas and fugues of Paul Hindemith: a neo-baroque style with all of the polyphony of baroque music and none of the harmonic dogma.
§ § § § §
I would still insist on differentiating between novels which contain flawed conventional narratives and those which pursue different ideas of structure and content. Otherwise straightforward fiction which becomes overly didactic or polemical seems to me to be flawed (though not necessarily bad). However, an experimental or idiosyncratic novel might contain a great deal of material one would normally expect to find in a different form (such as an essay) without being flawed.
We've had deviations from the story-is-everything model since the novel's inception, and the previous century was a period of deliberate and drastic experimentation. I don't know that you can expect a novel by Raymond Quenau or Harry Mathews -- let alone Raymond Roussel or Robbe-Grillet -- to exemplify the modest virtues of a novel by a minimalist.
((Ironically, David Foster Wallace was categorized initially by academics as being a minimalist himself. This was just after the publication his first two books,
The Broom of the System and
Girl with Curious Hair.))
I'm not arguing against your aesthetic preferences, or denying that the characteristics which you prefer are to be found in a lot of good fiction. I'm only saying that novels which don't emphasize those particular virtues might contain others of equal merit, and that writers who overemphasize the approach you prefer might sometimes achieve a different kind of distracting self-consciousness (cf. the approach as outlined in John Gardner's
On Moral Fiction -- a book which I happen to despise).